Typically, when a first party desires to assign a file to a second party, the first party utilizes a manual process. By way of example, an insurance company phones or emails an attorney that it wishes to contract to handle a subrogation litigation. The insurance company then copies or scans the necessary data pertaining to the claim and sends it via a standard delivery method (e.g. regular mail, fax, email, etc.).
Copying and/or scanning and sending the necessary data is often time consuming and delays the acceptance of the referral by the proposed vendor. Such a delay is undesirable. For example, in subrogation litigation there is a generally inverse relationship between the amount of time the claim goes uncollected and the successful collection of the payment. That is, the longer a claim goes uncollected, the less likely it is to be successfully collected.
Because each referral must be manually sent to each vendor, this process can often be laborious and require many hours for the client to successfully assign the referral. The client must keep track of the vendor(s) that the files have been sent to as well as physically send the files to each proposed vendor via a standard delivery method.
Furthermore, before the client can send the file out to vendors, it must first find suitable vendors for the file. Again, this can often take considerable time and effort on the client's part. For each proposed vendor, the client must physically send the necessary data. Of course, the more often the client has found vendors for related files in the past, the less amount of time it will likely take to successfully assign related files in the future. Nevertheless, as the assigning process is a manual process, it remains time consuming to repeatedly copy, scan and send the necessary data.
If the first proposed vendor rejects the referral, the client must find another vendor and send the necessary data to that vendor. This process will continue until either a proposed vendor accepts the referral or the client decides to close the file without action (e.g. without payment of a claim). Additionally, for each new referral, this process must be repeated.
Once an appropriate vendor is identified and accepts the referred file, the vendor typically needs to obtain certain additional data. Again, as this data must be copied and/or scanned and sent via a standard delivery method, undesirable further delay results. Upon receipt of the necessary data, the vendor typically utilizes an automated claim processing system. Such automated claim processing systems are well known in the art, and include both proprietary and open-source platforms.
As the vendor referral process is typically a manual process requiring considerable time and effort for each referral, there is a clear need in the art for an automated vendor management system and method.